“This area is under Muslim sovereignty,” the senior officer on the Temple Mount said to me.
“I thought that we were in Jerusalem, the capital of Israel,” I answered, as I set out on a series of letter-writing campaigns and meetings with the chief of Israel police, the attorney general and the minister for internal security.

Israel’s government did not want to liberate Jerusalem. Or to be more specific, the Labor and National Religious Party ministers did not want to liberate Jerusalem. “Who needs that whole Vatican?” Defense Minister Moshe Dayan explained at the time.

The following is my response to a woman who criticized me for visiting the Temple Mount. In a letter to me, she claimed that I broke the law and irresponsibly provoked Arab anger. She suggested that my actions should conform to the will of the “majority.”

When people thought that Avigdor Lieberman would someday be prime minister, I explained that Yisrael Beiteinu would disappear from the political map. The reason is that, like Kadima, the former foreign minister’s party is about a person, not a party.

The 2013 Israeli elections were supposed to have been boring. The pundits promised that the final result is already clear and there is nothing new under the sun. However, with less than two weeks to go until the polls open, we are in the throes of one of the most fascinating election campaigns that Israel has known. It is a campaign that faithfully reflects the deep currents of change in Israeli society. Nobody can yet predict its final outcome.